A number of systems and programs are offered on the market for the design, the engineering and the manufacturing of objects. CAD is an acronym for Computer-Aided Design, e.g. it relates to software solutions for designing an object. CAE is an acronym for Computer-Aided Engineering, e.g. it relates to software solutions for simulating the physical behavior of a future product. CAM is an acronym for Computer-Aided Manufacturing, e.g. it relates to software solutions for defining manufacturing processes and operations. In such computer-aided design systems, the graphical user interface plays an important role as regards the efficiency of the technique. These techniques may be embedded within Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems. PLM refers to a business strategy that helps companies to share product data, apply common processes, and leverage corporate knowledge for the development of products from conception to the end of their life, across the concept of extended enterprise.
The PLM solutions provided by Dassault Systemes (under the trademarks CATIA, ENOVIA and DELMIA) provide an Engineering Hub, which organizes product engineering knowledge, a Manufacturing Hub, which manages manufacturing engineering knowledge, and an Enterprise Hub which enables enterprise integrations and connections into both the Engineering and Manufacturing Hubs. All together the system delivers an open object model linking products, processes, resources to enable dynamic, knowledge-based product creation and decision support that drives optimized product definition, manufacturing preparation, production and service.
Fashion industry interest has grown tremendously for CAD tools. A first concern deals with the optimization of the manufacturing of apparels e.g. in order to reduce fabrics scrap, minimize cycle times). A second concern deals with the simulation of the aspect of garments. Indeed, it can be necessary to obtain the most realistic aspect of the rendering of a garment, in terms of texture and light with a great level of detail to help the stylist in the creation process.
Furthermore, the need for visual accuracy in realism may be not so demanding, but the virtual experience has to give the same visual feeling that the garment will produce in real life and particularly when motion is involved. Such real-time experience includes virtual try-out, virtual fashion show, and choreography in performing arts, where the realism is the ultimate achievement that needs to be guaranteed by simulation.
However, the limits are rapidly met: the garment may be too complex for real-time, or the number of objects to simulate can be too massive.
A first solution to this problem consists in dividing the garment into smaller domains, which are solved in parallel. This is quite a classical method in the field of Structural Analysis with Finite Elements Method (FEM). A structure is decomposed into several sub-structures called domains; the decomposition is based on mesh geometrical properties without any additional constraints. The different domains are solved in parallel, either the solver architecture is multi-threaded (but this not fully scalable), or several servers run in parallel. This is however not applicable for real-time simulation: indeed, the need of accuracy and coherence on the frontiers of domain requires coupling procedures, where solvers iterate to converge consistently and typically take hours to simulate few seconds of real phenomena.
Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) cope successfully with massiveness, thanks to an approach called Zoning. The virtual universe is partitioned into so called zones running in parallel. But the frontier between two zones isolates the two zones with one another. For that reason, objects are teleported from a zone to a second one at best with a minimal state continuity, but no zone to zone interaction is possible. Assuming a piece of fabrics is zoned like this, the resulting effect would be unrealistic.
Hence, on-line experience with complex garments and massiveness constraint cannot be managed in a scalable way because traditional scalable approaches are far from being real-time (e.g. FEM), or are not realistic in physical behavior (e.g. Zoning).
Within this context, there is still a need for an improved simulation an assembly of fabric pieces.